The West and China since 1500 (review)

This book is a macro-analytical account of the changing relationship between the West and China since the sixteenth century. It divides the history of the five-century Sino-Western cultural, economic, and political interaction into three phases: "coming together, rather slowly and on China's terms (1500-1800 )" (chapter 2), "close encounters, on the Western terms (1800-1900)" (chapter 3 ), and "hither and thither, in search of comfortable common ground (1900-2001 )" (chapter 4). Its narrative structure carries the optimistic implication that having passed through a Chinese-dominated and then a Western-dominated period, the West and China are now gradually overcoming their differences and are trying to work out new forms of cooperation.

One distinctive feature of Gregory's book is that it addresses this complicated topic from a cultural perspective. In defining the term "the West," Gregory emphasizes that "it is an underlying assumption of this book that there was an entity one can call 'the West' which, whatever its internal variations and rivalries, has displayed a recognizably distinct and consistent set of values and assumptions in its relations with other traditions" (p. 2). These values and assumptions include extensive trade within a free market, Christian faith, and diplomatic equality founded on international laws, all of which have developed from the unique geographical and historical conditions of Europe. The West thus stands in vivid contrast to the Chinese Empire, which was built on an inward-looking economy, a centralized dynastic government, a lack of any revealed religion, and rule by "good men" rather than by rational laws. Gregory, probably drawing on the findings of sinologists such as Mark Elvin and Weberian sociologists, emphasizes that while these cultural elements enabled China to create high levels of social, economic, and technological development before the eighteenth century, they also helped to cultivate among the Chinese people, particularly the ruling elite, a conservativism and an attitude of suspicion toward the wider world that left it ill equipped to meet the challenges of the nineteenth century. Gregory thus reaffirms a mainstream but nonetheless controversial opinion in Western sinology that the conflicts between the West and China in the last five hundred years originated from cultural rather than political differences.

While careful to avoid exaggerating the intensity of Sino-Western interaction in the premodern era, Gregory admits that the contacts between the two great civilizations were initiated by small groups of European traders, missionaries, and diplomats in a few contact zones such as the Imperial Palace in Beijing and the commercial city, Canton. Confined by cultural barriers and restricted by regulations imposed by the Chinese emperors, whose indifference to the Western "barbarians" was reflected in events such as the Rites Controversy and Lord McCartney's unsuccessful visit to China, the cultural agents from Europe had to be contented with a few social and economic activities within these contact zones. Gregory pointedly concludes that in China "what was rising over this period was not so much European influence as European presence" (p. 71). In Europe, similarly, apart from a few eighteenth-century admirers of Confucianism, Chinese gardening, and Chinese-style systems of rule, knowledge of which had been introduced by the Jesuits and the philosophes, Chinese civilization was still a remote territory.

Like many scholars, Gregory maintains that the major factors that transformed Sino-Western relations were the Opium War and the consequential "treaty system," which benefited not only the British but also other Western powers. However, his observation that the treaties concluded between China and the Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century were "unequal but limited" is disputable. For him, that the delegates from Britain, in the summer of 1842, surprised the Chinese officials in the negotiation by asking for so little in the way of concessions, showed that "acquisition of territory was not what these treaties were essentially about, except for the Russians. None of the Western powers involved sought more than...